This is the last excerpt I'll be blogging from the rough draft of The Undressing of America, because it's time to forget everything else except getting the
thing done and onto the shelves.
The muscle-building movement that swept up Bernard McFadden in the 1880s poured largely from a surge of Prussian nationalism seven decades before. Humiliated by Napoleon’s armies and wanting to regain their momentum as the rising power of central Europe, Prussia’s leaders embraced a system of physical education for their upper-class schools, their gymnasia, a rigorous individual development of muscles and agility that they called Turnverein but that the English-speaking world would come to call gymnastics.
It was a more mythological than practical gesture, for just as the practice of combat was being taken from the nobility and mercenaries and assigned to masses of conscripted commoners, as industry replaced human physical labor, as men’s lives grew steadily more room-bound and sedentary, the nation gave itself to the creation of an ideal citizen modeled on the warriors of classical Greece. But the ideal rang deeply in the hearts of the European, and soon physical fitness became part of the education of every young man of the dominant classes.
By mid-century the interest in building muscles had spread to men of the middle class, although in a far more individualized and less romantic form. Strength was a way to press back against the unhealthiness of industrial life and a compensation for the obscurity and impotence of the new urban society. But as ever, the alternative to industrialization followed industrial logic itself: repetitive motion, rigid control, valorized tedium, the mastery of physical power through planning and discipline. Weight training became especially popular in England, the most industrialized and urbanized of nations. Soon after, it jumped to America, where it took on a particular edge of competitive individualism, as well as a romantic primitivism, as images of Indian braves with naked torsos and the strong men of a pre-mechanical democracy—the village smithy with arms like iron bands—still stood for perfect manhood in the national imagination.
Mass print carried the new fascination from nation to nation and from city to small town to farmhouse. Books and pamphlets on self-improvement had become a mainstay of cheap publishing, as the culture of progress, competition, and the conquest of nature stirred vast numbers of young men to lift themselves by their mental, professional, and physical bootstraps. Fitness books enabled them to become men of robust power like the heroes of the popular novels on sale at the same newsstands. Improvements in the cheap reproduction of artwork in the final few decades of the century served physical fitness instruction especially well by enabling positions and exercises to be clearly demonstrated. By the end of the 1880s authors were promoting competing fitness systems and selling their own dumbbells and Indian clubs from ads in the backs of their books.
Then Prussia once again brought a new twist to the relationship of man and his muscles. The boy was born just a year before Bernard McFadden, although not in a land laid low by civil war but in an ascendant nation just uniting Germany and poised to avenge itself on France; to grow up in Prussia in the 1870s and 1880s was to grow up believing that the world was one’s future spoils. Like McFadden, he discovered weight training early and made it the great passion of his life. His dedication was so great that by his early twenties he was touring international stages as a strong man, whereupon he abandoned the name Friedrich Müller—as common a name as a German could have—and billed himself, with an echo of Polish exoticism, as Eugen Sandow. (The fallen kingdom of Poland embodied a lost nobility in the imaginations of men on the eastern edge of the German Empire then; a young scholar named Friedrich Nietzsche, also consumed with visions of the superior man, made spurious claims to Polish descent.)
Strong-man exhibitions were popular enough all over Europe, but by the late 1880s they’d become especially popular in England. Sandow stood out among them all: he broke chains and bent metal rods with the best of them, but most compelling about him was his sculptural perfection. Sandow more than any of his predecessors cared about the appearance of his naked body, and his particular system of weight lifting and resistance training created sharply delineated muscles of a sort that men concerned only with power could not provide. The crowds cheered when he swelled his chest and sent a snapped chain flying; but, as clever promoters would observe, they gasped when he flexed his arms. The previous champion strong man of England—whom Sandow defeated in the public competition that made him famous—called himself Charles Sampson and sought to evoke a Biblical awe. Sandow was immediately compared by the popular press to Greek and Roman statues.
Yet what Sandow pioneered—what soon came to be called “body building”—was far less a return to Classical aesthetics than a new and very modern vision of the human body. Old-style strong men played carnival side shows; Sandow commanded music-hall stages. Admiration for Sandow was not admiration for native strength but for the work he had brought to making himself a new kind of man. He provided a new dream of perfectibility, of complete reform of the individual body, that resonated with the utopian aspirations then ascendant in the West. But he also promised the mass replicability of that perfection, because everyone in his audience knew that he was no freak of nature but a normal man who had found the way to make himself like that. Sandow promised that with scientific logic and discipline we could all become perfect.
Such was Sandow’s international reputation that in early 1893 one of New York’s most successful opera and musical theater impressarios, Maurice Grau, brought him across the Atlantic to serve as the crowd-pleasing finale to a very slightly risqué comedy called Adonis; after the final scene, the curtain reopened to reveal Sandow striking poses to show off his contours, then performing feats of strength. Almost immediately, however, the star was stolen by a sharper and younger promoter, a German-American Sandow’s own age, named Florenz Ziegfeld.
Ziegfeld saw in Sandow what no one else had, because he stood, like so many young Americans, between two worlds. His family in Friesland had been affluent and cultured; his father moved to Chicago to found a music school. Young Flo, however, was of a racy new generation, young men who came of age in swelling American affluence and under the ever-brighter lights of the booming cities. He repeatedly dropped out of school and clashed with his parents, preferring clothes, girls, and gambling to the sedate world of the respectable bourgeoisie. He understood the duality of American taste, its young love of sensation and its nervous pursuit of the “high class,” and he saw how perfectly Eugen Sandow bridged that split. Flo Ziegfeld knew that people liked to look at naked flesh and exceptional bodies. And he knew that the way that the way to ease the self-consciousness of the better class of customer enough that he or she would pay to see it—and the way to quiet the censors—was by dressing that flesh in high-minded artistry.
He brought Sandow back to Chicago to feature him at the Columbian Exposition, where together they developed a new presentation: living man as classical statue. Sandow dusted his skin with white powder and, clad only in a loincloth, struck the poses of the Discus Thrower, David, Hercules, and others that the crowds would recognize from books and illustrated postcards. Carefully placed spotlights, blacking out while Sandow changed position and clicking back on from new angles, gave him a glow of unreality. When Sandow lifted great weights he did so in static tableaux.
Then Ziegfeld played his trump: he invited Chicago’s most prominent society ladies and promised that anyone who gave two hundred dollars to charity would be granted a back-stage audience with the great man himself, including a chance to feel his mighty arms. On opening night he snagged the wife of George Pullman, king of railroad sleeping cars and founder of a planned, utopian town bearing his name. Sandow the Magnificent became an instant sensation.
Sandow wasn’t the only performer at the Chicago fair to bring in huge crowds by exhibiting his body, but he was the one who seemed to dodge the criticism of the defenders of decency. Other attractions on the Midway—most famously Little Egypt, the “hoochie-coochie” dancer—were assailed by church and civic groups and occasionally shut down by the police. Among those who attacked such exhibits most vigorously was Anthony Comstock. After twenty years as the dominant censor in America and then at the zenith of his power, Comstock had been broadening his sights beyond the obscene publications that he had largely driven underground to include larger cultural targets: theaters, art galleries, and world’s fairs. But Sandow he seems never to have remarked on. The ethnographical interest of Little Egypt may not have been enough to deflect his ire, but Sandow’s commitment to health and art apparently was, at least for the moment.
Bernard McFadden was aware of none of this as he filed into the dimly lit theater and saw the first spotlights go on. He thought nothing about cultural changes or moral battles. He was aware only of the breathtaking sight of Sandow the Magnificent—and of the endless line of people still behind him beyond the theater doors, every one of them eager to lay down his money for a glimpse.
